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The latest AOL ads focus on buddy lists, chat rooms, and now, for some reason, WebMDnot e-mail. And really, if AOL's future rested on its e-mail alone, the monolith would tumble fast. Though it's more expensive than any regular dial-up service, AOL has the least capable and least compatible e-mail of any client in this story.

AOL doesn't import or export regular e-mail; its system is proprietary. The same goes for its address book, which is basic and can't import contact lists, a particularly annoying shortcoming. (You can forward your old e-mails to your new account if you must, but retyping address book entries is tedious.) Compounding the impression that you have little control over your e-mail, all sent and received mail is stored on AOL's servers.

Sure it's nice that you can check your e-mail, see your address book, and so forth online, but that also means that AOL decides how long to keep messages. After you've read e-mail, it moves from New Mail to Read Mail. Fine. But then AOL deletes it. Not fine. Ditto with Sent Mail. Unless you move sent and received mail manually or have it moved automatically into your Personal Filing Cabinet, AOL deletes read and sent mail after one week and unread mail after 27 days. The Personal File Cabinet isn't immediately obvious but is a reasonably capable local mail-filing system; you can also choose to store all read and sent mail in your Filing Cabinet automatically. This option is off by default.

As ever, when you send mail to other AOL usersand only to other AOL usersyou can view the read/unread status of e-mails sent and retrieve messages that recipients haven't collecteda major bonus. As far as corresponding with non-AOL users, AOL 7.0 is an improvement over previous versions. Formatting options such as fonts and colors, as well as hyperlinks and images display properly when sent from AOL mail to Internet mail and vice versa. The AOL client can read HTML mail properly but doesn't let you compose it.

Using AOL is like riding in a bumper car instead of a real automobile: You're confined and have little power, and you can't go where you want without lots of jerks bumping into you. With AOL, you don't get just the client, you get the works: online service, community, chat, e-mail client, pop-up windows, instant messaging, and a browserall in one interface. It can get pretty crowded, making e-mail a marginal element on the page. Because AOL's client is part and parcel of its service, mail controls such as spam filtering have to be integrated, and this has not been done well. Although each of the seven screen names included with an AOL account functions totally separately from the others, only the master account can access mail filters. This makes sense in cases where the master account belongs to the parents and subaccounts belong to the kids, but when subaccounts are designated as unrestricted adult accounts, there's no excuse not to give them access to mail controls.

AOL has addressed the volumes of complaints it has received about spam with more granular filters than before, including a Notify button on the New Mail box, for quick reporting to AOL's mail abuse teamsounds good, in theory. But in the interest of science, we repeatedly forwarded some particularly offensive spam from one of our accounts to another; the recipient hit the notify button several times over the course of the next few weeks, but at press time, we were still able to send her nasty spam just fine, thank you. (For unlimited access, $23.90 a month. America Online Inc., www.aol.com.)

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